Posts tagged How would you change

Regular readers know that I don't get to review too many devices, so it's a perk when one of mine appears on the HWYC timetable. Withings' belt-worn activity monitor was one of the best in the category, but it was a category that was rapidly being superseded by wrist-based hardware. After all, it'...

Today's trawl into the annals of gadget history takes us to the first Moto X, a device that, at the time, we believed would be a turning point for Google and Android. After all, it was the first device Motorola had released since Google swallowed the firm, and came with some notable features. Betw...

The whole point of NVIDIA's Shield was that it could stream PC games straight to it. Rather than stopping there, however, the experimental handheld console could also play any Android title, as well as all of the other internet-based stuff you expect from a smartphone or tablet. When we shoved the...

When we placed Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 in front of Joseph Volpe, it was all he could do not to roll his eyes. Rather than any headline features, the slate was merely an improvement on the second generation, just with a newer version of Android and, interestingly enough, an Intel chip. When he ...

On paper, a 'mini' version of a flagship is as simple as shrinking the screen size and the corresponding components, but in reality, it's a different story. Take Samsung's Galaxy S4 Mini, which had to make several big compromises to squeeze into a smaller body. In fact, our Brad Molen felt that th...

Whenever you talk about a Google device, it's hard to know where to assign credit: Google, or ASUS, the company actually building the thing in the first place. The second generation Nexus 7 may have cost $30 more than its $199 predecessor, but that cash seems to have all gone to make the hardware ...

It's a flagship Windows phone! It's a groundbreaking photography device that could revolutionize imaging! Nokia's Lumia 1020, with its 41-megapixel "Pureview" lens, promised images that could send Canon and Nikon's executives into fits of panic. When we placed it in the hands of Brad Molen, he sai...

Your humble narrator doesn't review too many gadgets, so it's always a treat when one hits the How Would You Change timetable. In my mind, the BlackBerry Q5 was the company's most important new device simply because it would show if BlackBerry could recapture its low-end dominance. After all, the ...

If you want to judge a gadget on its true strengths, stick several in a room full of Engadget editors and see which one they swarm around. For that alone, Acer's Iconia W3 was a winner as soon as the eight-inch full-Windows tablet arrived in the office. When Dana Wollman was able to wrestle it awa...

Lenovo's first Yoga machine still stands as a watershed moment in laptop and tablet design, but what of one of its successors, the ThinkPad Helix? In addition to those first two modes, you could spin the Helix's display outward, enabling you to use the device as a free-standing drawing display. Wh...

The headline for our review of Hewlett Packard's Slate 7 Android tablet says it all. When Melissa Grey described it as "Less of a hit, more of a miss," she was summing up the device's faults, which were numerous. Despite looking slim and trim, the device is unusually heavy, the display is disappoi...

Like its charismatic CEO, Razer is a company that's always on the go. Less than six months after we reviewed the 2013 Razer Blade, it'd been replaced with a fourth-generation edition. When our Sean Buckley reviewed the hardware, he found that it was one of the best gaming laptops that he'd used. T...

Samsung's bright idea with the Galaxy S4 Active was simple: Take a Galaxy S4, and shove it in a body that didn't shy away from drops, dust and water. When our Sarah Silbert put the device through its paces, she found that the device was better-looking than your average rugged handset. There was, h...

Huawei's career trajectory from Chinese white-label OEM to brand mainstream users "know" really hit a milestone with the Ascend P6. After all, this was the device that was designed to blend the best of iOS and Android into a mainstream device that looked good. Certainly, the P6 was a knock-out, bu...

Like the kid who got picked on in school, Nokia's Lumia 920 took some time out, got a chemical peel and returned a few months later as the Lumia 925. In fact, by ditching the bright colors and bulky frame, the 925 presented itself as a mature, refined device that separated itself from previous Lum...

In a way, How Would You Change is a bit like archeology, digging back through the gadgets of yesteryear to find out what we think of them now. We sat HP's Pavilion 14 Chromebook down in front of Myriam Joire, who did not have too many nice things to say about the device. Points of critique include...

Meet the new boss, broadly the same as the old boss. Except this variation of Apple's thin-and-light mobile PC was packing Haswell, Intel's power-sipping wonder chip, capable of giving the 2013 MBA its 12-plus-hour battery life and nippy speed. When we sat this down in front of Tim Stevens' hands,...

When I reviewed Huawei's Ascend W1 last summer, I was surprised at how much I liked it, considering its bargain-basement price. Microsoft clearly deserves plaudits for getting Windows Phone 8 to work on such low-power hardware, and Huawei made a real effort to produce a solid feeling, well-made de...

Head into the basement and dust off that Jerry Goldsmith CD, because this week, How Would You Change is looking at Acer's Aspire R7. With a hinged display, the laptop hybrid could fold down to a tablet, or be used with the screen essentially floating over the keyboard, a mode known internally as t...

Welcome to How Would You Change, where we go through our old reviews asking if, now that you've had a year or so to use these devices yourself, what you'd have done differently. This week, it's Sony's Xperia Tablet Z, which reviewer Mat Smith found to be the company's best tablet yet. Unfortunatel...